Evaluation of 'Fight or Flight': Hartnett saves it from crash landing

Please note: If you are afraid of flying, director James Madigan's “fight or flight” is not for you. But when a cheap and cheerful deployment-action thriller à la “Bullet Train” is one of the outstanding heartbreakers of the Y2K era in her alley, then belly to this bar (airport). The film is not a masterpiece, not even a vulgar, but it is cheeky and entertaining in its dizzying hyper-violence, thanks to Josh Hartnett's star round, who has proven that he is particularly large in Bozo mode during his recent Renaissance.

Hartnett was the brooding evil boy in films such as “The Fakulty” and “The Virgin Suicides”, who closed him to fame at the end of the 1990s. But in recent years his career has been revived and characters such as “Boy Sweat Dave” in Guy Ritchies “Wrath of Man” played and particularly delicious works in M. Night Shyamalans “Trap” in M. Night Shyamalans “Trap”. For “Fight or Flight”, Hartnett with his bleached hair and freight shorts looks directly from the 2000s. The only difference is that it is now unleashed, is freed from these atmospheric bonds: wild decons and often covered with false blood, the living Hue of the strawberry jam.

In fact, “fight or flight” would not work without its gumper central performance, which the absurd premise brings an edge of mania, which is essentially “assassin on an airplane”. The script by Brooks McLaren and “Shazam” actor DJ Cotrona is based on the type of “John Wick” style story that the action franchise has perfected when the question asked: What if there was a bounty on the head of a hit? “Fight or Flight” borrows the imagination and puts it in a close environment at great altitude, takes a humorous tone for his thrill.

Hartnett plays a Down-on-HiS-Glück Drifter named Lucas, who wakes up in Bangkok with a hangover, a black eye and his hated ex Katherine (Katee Sackhoff). Lucas, a high -ranking security specialist, is her last option after a hacker has stolen billions of cryptocurrency after a terrorist attack. Katherine needs Lucas to get on the same plane to get the hacker into custody (alive), and he is the only one she knows at the moment. When he gets the flight, he is not aware that a bounty on the head of the ghost has distributed itself over the dark network, and so the rest of the passengers are largely assassins who want to make a slight money.

And so there is aviation chaos when Lucas concludes a coteria of bad guys through a haze of drugs and alcohol. He has his own reasons to want to do the task – events in his past that explain why he ended up in the heart of darkness through the bottom of a whiskey bottle in Southeast Asia. Of course, they are honorable, and when we hit ghost, we discover motivations that are similarly altruistic when they are written a little flat.

The filmmakers would rather concentrate on the unusual violence anyway. Hartnett keeps the corridors up and down, through the freight area and in the bathroom and uses the room and tools in its area. But it is more fun to watch how his face moves as his body, his crazy eyes and tight grin, which provide the tension with high wire. He has a great chemistry with a lively flight attendant (Charithra Chandran) and faces every enemy with an intensive intensity with a combination and a feeling of real surprise when it is best. Madigan likes the trick, which makes particularly bloody sequences to energy-efficient, tonally non-unanimous melodies-hardnett strikes and stings through everything, from punk to polka.

But then the already stupid “flight or the flight” turns to the incredibly caricaturist turn when he begins his descent, in a tangle of hallucinatory madness, undeserved twists and stunning cliffhangers. It is a real Looney melody with shocking amount of digital blood. The film disappears almost exclusively, whatever it attracted, except that everything happens so quickly. Surprisingly, Hartnets Lucas did not worry about his reception, even if the film around him fell apart in the air. Ergo, the old truism has never been true: when it comes to “fight or flight”, your mileage can vary.

Katie Walsh is a tribune news service film critic.